The major bit of news is that, from now on, all releases will happen on Windows, Mac and Linux in parallel. My colleagues at Glare have helped me tremendously in getting Chaotica set up to build right next to Indigo Renderer using a fully automated build system on all platforms, so the days of some platform releases lagging behind are over! A lot of code cleanup and bugfixing (notably saving/loading of final transforms in .chaos format) has gone on between this and the last release, and I'm happy to say that the Chaotica codebase is looking extremely healthy. Progress is happening really quickly now, especially on the editor and associated features.

As part of this, specifically using HSV palette splines, Chaotica now starts up with randomised Moebius IFS parameters instead of just a blank workspace; as a fun extra, the randomisation can be done partially, i.e. only the palette (Ctrl+P), transformations (Ctrl+U), shaders (Ctrl+I) and selectors (Ctrl+O). This kind of setup is how I did much of my fractal art back in ~2006-2007, and while it's still a bit rough, I look forward to making this feature "smarter", and of course releasing the editor which will allow for complete control

Also worth mentioning is that the brightness better matches the result in Apophysis/flam3 now, but it's still not quite the same and still needs a little adjusting usually. The realtime camera controls are back, having been AWOL since Chaotica 0.49, and can be used by holding Alt and dragging with the left mouse button (pan), right mouse button (zoom) and both buttons (rotate).

Over the next few days I'll be working on the new Forum and website, so stay tuned for this! If you're a Linux or Mac user looking for really fast, high resolution+quality flame fractal rendering, now is a great time to get a Chaotica 1.0 licence on pre-sale On that note, if anyone does a comparison of Chaotica to other fractal software on these platforms, I am really interested to see it

I'm indebted as ever to the friendly and helpful people here in the dA fractal art community for their motivation and help, particularly my "right hand man" FarDareisMai!

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any bugs or other issues, thanks!

Chaotica is free to use up to 1920x1920 resolution currently, above which (eg. for print making) you need a commercial licence. As for the learning curve, I'm sure you can figure it out there's also a (rather old) basic usage video here: [link]